Labour could learn a lot from private schools, if it had a mind to

By Tom Utley

12:01AM GMT 10 Dec 2004

I had a heart-rending moment yesterday morning, when I leafed through one of my 11-year-old son's school exercise books, which he had left on the kitchen table. He had written a long and learned essay about Martin Luther and the Reformation - two pages in his smallest and neatest handwriting.

No doubt most of it had been lifted from the internet or from the Children's Britannica, but he had obviously put a fair bit of work into it, all the same. At the bottom of his essay, otherwise uncorrected and perhaps even unread, his teacher at the local comprehensive had written one sentence in pencil. It said: "You should have written about Martin Luther King."

Oh, well, I suppose the silly boy should have listened more carefully when his homework was being set. But these things happen. The last thing I want to do is hold up my son for ridicule. On the contrary, I was very favourably impressed by his work on Luther, and I reckon that he deserved a pat on the back for it.

But nor do I want to criticise his teacher. True, it must have been dispiriting for the boy to be told so dismissively that he had expended all that effort on researching and writing about the wrong bloke. But, equally, it must be exasperating for teachers when their pupils fail to pay proper attention in class.

If my heart sank, this was mostly because my boy was being asked to write essays about Martin Luther King, rather than about the great German theologian from whom he took his name, whose influence was to be felt throughout the next five centuries of European history. That sort of thing speaks volumes about the ethos of a school.

Yes, of course King was an extremely important figure in the racial politics of the United States in the 1960s. And, yes, of course he is a worthy subject for study. It is just that I have a nasty suspicion - perhaps completely unjustified - that the school's purpose in teaching its pupils about King is not so much to give them an understanding of modern American history as to din into them the importance of treating members of all races equally.

If my suspicion is right, then I have two objections to this approach to education. The first is that children of my sons' colour-blind generation have absolutely no need to be taught that racial prejudice is stupid and wrong.

All four of my boys have friends of every skin tone - black, brown, yellow and pink. It simply wouldn't occur to them or their friends - if only their teachers would stop banging on about racism - that any one race was superior to any other.

My second objection is that there is a much better way of turning out fair-minded citizens than by giving children endless lessons in political correctness. I wish that the state sector would waste less of its time on warning pupils against the dangers of smoking, global warming and fatty foods, or singing the praises of condoms.

The best way to produce good citizens is to give children a thorough grounding in maths, literature, science, language and all the other academic disciplines. Stop telling them what to think, and teach them to think for themselves.

I have never made any secret of the fact that, if only I were rich enough, I would have sent my 11-year-old to Dulwich College, where his two oldest brothers went.

I have often wished that I had kept it quiet, and thereby spared embarrassment all round - to the boy and, not least, to myself. That way, I would also have avoided the risk of giving offence to the teachers at his comprehensive - not at all a bad one - who have every claim on my gratitude.

But there is no getting away from the fact that, in Britain, private schools really are very much better than state comprehensives. I had not realised quite how much better they were, until I saw this week's report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Not only did this show that British 15-year-olds were slipping fast down the international league tables in maths, reading and science (giving the lie to the Government's claims that, under New Labour, school standards are improving relentlessly).

More startlingly still, it showed that there were only two countries in the developed or semi-developed world - Uruguay and Brazil - in which the performance gap between state and private schools was greater than it is in the United Kingdom.

There are plenty of reasons for this, of course. One is that our private schools - the best ones, anyway - tend to cream off the brightest pupils from the most comfortably off middle-class households. A very large proportion of their pupils have been brought up, surrounded by books, by parents who set great store by academic achievement.

It is also true that British private schools attract some of the best teachers, who are drawn to them by the pleasant working conditions and better salaries than they would get in the state sector.

Only the saintliest few, offered the chance of comfortable rooms at Eton or Westminster and a classroom full of children eager to learn, would choose to teach instead in one of our worst inner-city comprehensives, where social work and riot control are as much a part of the job as Shakespeare and long division.

But these considerations apply in other countries, too, and they are only a part of the story. Another part of it is that British private schools tend to have higher expectations of their pupils than their counterparts in the state sector. Their teachers find their work more rewarding, not only because they are paid more and their pupils are tamer, but also because they are much freer than their state-school colleagues from interference by central government. They are not constantly being told what to teach and how to teach it.

Instead of attacking the private sector - threatening schools with losing their charitable status and urging universities to discriminate against Etonians, Wykehamists and the rest - the Government should learn from its success. Let us have more competition within state schools, more selection, more discipline, more freedom for teachers and higher expectations of pupils. And how about a little more Martin Luther, and a little less Martin Luther King?